{"id":61439,"date":"2015-11-14T06:53:37","date_gmt":"2015-11-14T11:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=61439"},"modified":"2015-11-14T22:05:40","modified_gmt":"2015-11-15T03:05:40","slug":"61439","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2015\/11\/14\/61439\/","title":{"rendered":"…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Later: At the end of a three year Air Force assignment to the USAFE hospital in Lakenheath England, it was about time to come home to our real lives. For our last trip to the Continent, we decided on camping through France. I had several weeks of leave and though we’d been to France often, we hadn’t ‘toured.’ So we loaded our diminutive Morris Minor with camping gear and took the Ferry to Calais. It couldn’t have been a more perfect trip. Somewhere in the middle we awoke in our tent and simultaneously noticed that our teeth were slightly purple [so we changed to white wine]. The trip back to Paris from the South was our only autoroute\"Morris leg [superhighway], and our top-speed-low-sixty-miles-per-hour Morrris was definitely out classed, but we made it to the outskirts of Paris at midnight. The next morning, we decided that a ride down the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es would be  a nice way to end our European adventures before getting on the Ferry, and soon onto the plane home.<\/p>\n

Totally by chance, without our even really noticing, we were the last car allowed onto the boulevard that day. It was inauguration day for Giscard d’Estaing who had defeated François Mitterrand. Neither of us spoke anything more than "menu" French, so after two weeks of wandering, we were news-dumb and had no clue we were crashing a presidential parade. The streets were lined with spectators who were as amused as we were with our toy British car as a one-car parade. They waved their flags, laughed, and clapped as did we – basking in our short-lived fame. It was, indeed, one fine Swan Song.<\/p>\n

I’m telling my little story because I don’t know what else to do to say I love France the country, France the culture, and France the people – even the Parisians [though I’m not sure that was mutual]. I wasn’t even mad when France passed on our invitation to Iraq. Afghanistan seemed right but Iraq didn’t, so I agreed. I hate it that they’re about to have to go through what we experienced after 911. There’s no other choice now, but there’s really no point…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Later: At the end of a three year Air Force assignment to the USAFE hospital in Lakenheath England, it was about time to come home to our real lives. For our last trip to the Continent, we decided on camping through France. I had several weeks of leave and though we’d been to France often, we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61439"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61478,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61439\/revisions\/61478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}